Ruminations from a jaded old guy

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This annoying article cropped up and irritated the hell out of me. Why?
Because Autism is a catchall for anybody with autistic symptoms, so is so diverse it’s totally impossible to say if ANY treatment effectively prevents/heals/lessens TRUE autism.
True Autism being a genetic neurological disorder, and DSM defined Autism being whomever passes the DSM autism test.
As with most definitions in the DSM, whichever version, the relation between the tests for the definition are wholly based on the assumption that the definition is correct in the first place.
Which is a remarkable circular (lack of)logic since the DSM contains mostly observationally based selfconfirming definitions. There is no objective way to determine if they hold water.

A child’s risk of developing autistic disorder appears to be reduced when women take folic acid around the time of conception through early pregnancy. The findings appear today in JAMA.

Supplementation with folic acid around the time of conception has been found to reduce the risk of neural tube defects in children, such as spina bifida, and emerging evidence also suggests that such supplementation is associated with reduced risk of other disorders related to impaired development of the nervous system, including autism spectrum disorders.

To test the association, researchers sampled data for 85 176 children born in 2002 to 2008 who were enrolled in the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study and followed up through March 31, 2012. Mothers were asked about folic acid intake from 4 weeks before to 8 weeks after the start of pregnancy, defined as the first day of the last menstrual period before conception. By…